


Your Eyes Are Like a Trip to IKEA (I Keep Getting Lost in Them)

by Carrieosity



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anxiety Attacks, College Student Katsuki Yuuri, First Meetings, Fluff and Humor, IKEA, M/M, POV Alternating, Reference to SCP, Shopping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-10 14:54:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20853605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carrieosity/pseuds/Carrieosity
Summary: If you have to get hopelessly lost in the belly of an IKEA store, with no help or hope in sight, it's always better to do it while flirting with a gorgeous stranger.





	Your Eyes Are Like a Trip to IKEA (I Keep Getting Lost in Them)

**Author's Note:**

> I had this silly idea a while back, wandering through IKEA with my husband and joking about people who go on dates there. Which we were totally not doing, of course. Despite the fact that we bought nothing, had dinner there, and generally just...hung out with each other for a couple hours. 
> 
> Anyway.
> 
> I was imagining how different fictional characters would handle being lost there, from freaking out to just rolling with it, and then I got to these two dopes, and it sort of snowballed from there. I apologize for nothing.
> 
> All the all-caps words are, naturally, real IKEA products.

There were too many people.

There were too many people, and they were all milling in aimless, unpredictable patterns that made walking in a straight line an impossibility. Yuuri found himself having to sidestep constantly and continually backtrack to avoid bumping into anyone, mumbling a steady stream of apologies to the people following behind him for having inconvenienced them in turn. His eyes flitted back and forth, seeking an open space where he could stop for just a moment, stand still, and try to _ breathe. _

Yuuri was sweating, feeling more exhausted than truly was warranted for the hour or so that he’d been wandering. His fingernails were starting to dig crescents into his palms, but focusing on the small twinges of pain was one of the only things keeping his mind from surrendering entirely to the panic that was threatening to take over. At this point, though, he knew it was only a matter of time before the inevitable breakdown. He’d been fruitlessly searching for Phichit and Leo for—he checked his phone, grimacing when he noted that he _still_ had no signal—almost forty minutes so far, and no matter what his irrational brain was trying to tell him, he knew the Ikea building wasn’t all _that_ enormous. If he was going to find them, he should have done so by now, which meant…

_ Breathe, Yuuri. 1, 2, 3… _

Yuuri hadn’t even wanted to come along. His roommate Phichit had dragged him, despite the fact that it wasn’t even their own apartment that needed to be furnished. Their friend Leo’s move to Detroit, to enroll in the university’s music business program, had led Phichit to enthusiastically volunteer to help decorate Leo’s new place, which had been entirely foreseeable. Shopping of any kind was one of Phichit’s major weaknesses, after all.

But there was no real reason why Yuuri had needed to be here, other than Phichit’s insistence that he “unplug before you wind up getting absorbed into the Microsoft Hive Mind.” _As though he isn’t the one pushing most of the games my way in the first place,_ Yuuri thought testily. Companies liked to send Phichit early access copies of games they hoped he’d review on his popular YouTube channel, and never mind that he himself rarely ventured beyond the realm of Candy Crush and Flappy Bird. Instead, any “reviewing” of the sample games came in the form of stealth-filming Yuuri when he was at his most sleep-deprived, blearily mumbling incoherent threats toward various NPCs as he grinded away. Apparently, there was a sizeable group of followers hooked on those videos, though Yuuri refused to go look for himself. Phichit had no moral high ground on this matter, really.

And now Leo and Phichit were somewhere else in the massive Ikea, probably still arguing about whether piles of beanbag chairs could reasonably stand in for more conventional living room seating. Or else they’d left without him, and there was absolutely no way to know. Yuuri couldn’t even find the damn exit himself, even if he’d been the one to drive the group here and had a way of leaving if he did manage to escape. The arrows on the floor were _supposed_ to lead him to the checkout and eventual freedom, but that seemed more and more like an elaborate prank. At one point, Yuuri was convinced he’d seen two arrows pointing at each other, as though there was meant to be a portal between them.

_My mind playing tricks on me,_ Yuuri told himself. _ It’s just those stupid Internet creepypasta stories the guys were talking about in the car. This is just a normal Ikea, not a sentient dungeon in disguise. There are doors, I know there are, and none of these workers are evil monsters. I’m not trapped, and I’m going to get out of here. I just need to…I need to…_

He swallowed down a wave of nausea. His heart was pounding too hard, too loud in his ears. It was no use; the panic attack he’d been trying to forestall was breaking through his efforts, sweeping through his veins and gripping his lungs. There were _too many people,_ and without looking at them, he just knew that they were all turning to stare, stare and point and mutter, and he had to get _away._ Choosing a direction at random, he plunged away from the main aisle and all its useless arrows, blindly aiming for some quiet corner where he could collapse and shatter into pieces. 

* * *

Victor stared blankly at the small child who was the most recent person to pull back the sheer curtains around his Fortress of Solitude. Okay, so it was a KURA bed with a curtain hanging over it, but it was serving his current purposes quite nicely. 

The little boy blinked at Victor. “You’re a grown-up,” he said. Victor just shrugged, not feeling up to engaging in conversation. The boy frowned a little. “You’re too big for this bed. It’s for kids.” When Victor didn’t respond further, the boy put a finger in his mouth, apparently having exhausted his arguments. They stared at each other for a few more minutes, before the kid turned and walked away.

“You forgot to close the door,” Victor muttered. He lifted one leg, idly kicking at the fabric in an attempt to get it to fall back in place. After a few kicks, it dropped over the opening again, leaving him once more in shadowed semi-isolation. He closed his eyes and huffed a little at the interruption.

Victor wasn’t upset at this point, not anymore. True, an hour ago, he had felt quite irritated, jabbing at his phone screen as though he could force the clock to admit it was lying and that he hadn’t been waiting for a quite unreasonable amount of time for Christophe to “be right back.” He’d managed to get two texts through, in between long periods of signalless deprivation, and though both messages were marked as “READ” (_"Chris, where are you? I’m by the bed linens”_ and _“I don’t care what his ass looks like, get back here!”_), there had been no sign of his friend, either digitally or physically.

But eventually the annoyance had faded, leaving a renewed determination to track down either Chris or the parked car—let Chris see what it felt like to be the one ghosted on, for a change. Victor had found neither, growing more and more upset as he’d tried, and finally landed in the food court, where he’d attempted to soothe his sorrows via bright pink lumps of Bakelse Prinsess cake. Now he had a somewhat queasy stomach, but a comparatively tolerable blanketing weight of surrender had settled over the spot where his distress had been.

_This is fine,_ he decided. _I can stay here. I’ve got pillows and my music library. There’s even a place to charge my phone in the restaurant. It’s fine. I can adapt._ _I could learn to like meatballs._

Victor was fumbling his wireless earbuds out of their case when he saw another silhouette outside the bed tent. A moment later it was abruptly pulled aside again, but this time instead of a child peering in at him, Victor found himself face to face with an angel. 

He blinked, attempting to adjust his eyes in the light, but the beauty of the face staring at him didn’t lessen; if anything, it grew more enhanced with sharper focus. Large, warm brown eyes, the sort in which a man could happily drown without a single regret, were slightly magnified by the most adorable blue-framed glasses imaginable. A mop of thick brown hair flopped forward over them, thoroughly disheveled, suggestive of fingers purposefully stroking and combing and perhaps even pulling. The finer points of the lovely young man’s frame were hidden by the (cozy!) college hoodie he was wearing (an intellectual!), but what Victor could glimpse was more than enough to pique his interest.

The angel was also currently in the process of hyperventilating. That was…not so good.

“I’m sorry!” the angel yelped, stumbling back a step. “S-sorry! I was…I’ll just…” His eyes were darting back and forth, and his chest was heaving with each quick breath he took. His hands fluttered at his sides in agitation. 

“Are you all right?” Victor cut in. He immediately wanted to slap himself for asking. _Of course he’s not all right! Does he look all right?_ “I mean, is there something—are you in trouble?” He sat up straighter, looking over the man’s shoulder. Maybe he was being chased? He certainly looked as though he was trying to escape from something or someone.

“No, I just—” A hysterical sound, part laugh and part sob ripped from the young man’s throat. Victor could see that his eyes were red around the edges, as though he had been crying or was about to. He prayed that the latter wasn’t the case; Victor had never been good at dealing with people crying.

The man looked as though he was about to bolt away, and even in the face of potential tears, that was the last thing Victor wanted to happen. “Please, sit,” he blurted, reaching out a hand. The man flinched away, and Victor hastily retracted the hand, raising his palm apologetically. “It’s okay,” he said, trying to sound as reassuring as he could. “I won’t—I’m not going to touch you. I just want to help. Is there anything I can do to help?”

Jerkily shaking his head, the young man dropped to the edge of the bed, the movement more of a collapse than a coordinated attempt at sitting. One hand rose to grip at the fabric over his chest, and he drew his feet up in front of him, pressing his face against his bent knees. His whole body was shaking like a leaf, but he wasn’t making any noise other than the thin wheezing of his gasps. His breathing was way too fast, and Victor felt alarm at the thought that the man might wind up fainting.

“Hey, maybe…okay, let me try…” Victor glanced around, but nobody seemed to notice what was happening, let alone offer any assistance. “How about this? If you can hear me, see if you can breathe when I do.” He didn’t know whether the young man was listening, but he started trying to take deep, slow breaths, exaggeratedly loud. _Please let this work,_ he desperately wished.

Amazingly, the shudders seemed to weaken a hair as the man fought to control his gasps. It seemed to take forever, but eventually the panicked wheezing stopped, and the stranger’s shoulders seemed to sag forward, releasing the tension that had gripped him. He lifted his face from his knees; the denim had left a slight imprint on his forehead from the force with which he’d been pressing, and his eyes were wet. “Oh, my God,” he muttered hoarsely, staring at the bed. 

“Better?” Victor said, a little weakly.

“Yeah,” came the reply, and then the young man lifted his eyes and seemed to take in Victor’s face for the first real time. His eyes widened again, though with less terror this time, and the color in his cheeks bloomed from pale to the red flush of embarrassment. “I am so sorry,” he stammered, sounding mortified. 

“You don’t need to apologize,” Victor hastened to say, waving his hands earnestly. “Honestly, you don’t! But are you okay now?”

Cheeks still colored, the man shrugged a shoulder. “I guess?” he said. “I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck, I still have no idea where I am, and now I sort of want to die for doing…_that_...in front of…” He gestured in Victor’s direction. “But I can breathe, and I’m not going to puke or pass out, so there’s that. Uh, thanks.”

“It was my pleasure.” Victor said before he could consider his response. _Jesus Christ._ He clapped a hand over his face. “That’s…I mean, not my _pleasure._ That sounded like I _enjoyed_ watching you suffer. Which I didn’t! What kind of person would enjoy that? I just…” He let the stream of word vomit trail off before he could come across like even more of a freak than he already had. A snort of laughter came from in front of him, and he lowered his hand to peek over his fingers.

“Okay, I actually might feel a little less like dying now,” the man said, showing a small smile. “Are you doing that on purpose, just to make me feel better, or are you always like this?” 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m extremely suave. Ask anyone.” Victor couldn’t help it; his chagrin melted away like ice in summer heat in the face of this man’s playful expression. “But if it helps, I can always trip over my shoelaces or fall face-first into a pie. Or cake, anyway. I don’t think they have pie here.”

“Mmm, don’t talk about food,” the stranger sighed ruefully, rubbing his stomach. “I didn’t have time to eat breakfast before I got thrown into a car and dragged here.”

“Breakfast? But it’s after three in the afternoon!” Victor said, frowning in concern. “You must be starving!”

Shrugging, the man wrinkled his nose (Victor tried not to whimper), biting his lip a little. “In fairness,” he confessed, “I’m not really a morning person. I’m usually not out of bed before eleven on a Saturday, so…”

“Ah,” Victor said, feeling a little relieved. “Still, low blood sugar can’t have helped…that.” He waved his hand, not knowing exactly what to call the crisis they’d just weathered. The man shook his head bashfully at the reminder, glancing downward, and Victor ached at the loss of eye contact. “My name’s Victor,” he offered, ducking his head to recapture the connection. He felt a thrill when those beautiful brown eyes met his own once more, a little guarded but not in a disinterested way.

“I’m Yuuri,” he said, his voice soft over the long “u” sound. “And I really am grateful for your help. Honestly, I was just looking for somewhere to ride it out on my own. I didn’t expect to find anyone here.”

“And of all the bed tents in all the Ikeas in all the world, you walked into mine,” Victor finished with a grin, pitching his voice low in his best attempt at Humphrey Bogart’s tough-guy slurring. 

Yuuri burst into sudden peals of laughter. “That was _terrible,”_ he gasped. “Casablanca…with a Russian accent? It’s Russian, right?” He leaned back against the foot of the bed frame, stretching out his legs so they rested alongside Victor’s, and crossed his ankles. Victor tried not to shift closer to the warmth he could feel through the denim of their jeans. “Not that I could do much better, though. When I’m drunk or just really tired, my accent gets bad enough that strangers start pantomiming at me, like they think I can’t understand English at all.” He chuckled. “It’s actually pretty funny to watch them, sometimes.”

They both laughed, feeling a newfound camaraderie, expatriates in solidarity. Victor didn’t want to break the spell, but something was niggling at the back of his mind, something Yuuri had said earlier. “Not to bring up old wounds or anything,” he said, “but before, when you were saying you felt better, you mentioned not knowing where you were. And also that you were thrown into a car and, um, dragged here?” He paused uncertainly. “Should we be looking for help or something?”

Yuuri rolled his eyes, laughing again, though with less humor. “No, I wasn’t actually kidnapped or anything. Involuntary shopping is just something my roommate likes to force on me. Only now he’s wandered off with a friend, and I have no idea where he is. Or where I am. Or, frankly, anything at all about how to find my way around or out of this stupid place.”

“Me, too!” Victor cried, sitting up straight again. “My friend Chris brought me here to help him pick some new wine and martini glasses to replace the ones that got broken at his last party. Well, we were barely to the dining department when he suddenly needed to go ‘freshen up,’ and he disappeared through one of those ‘shortcuts’ that might as well be gateways to another universe. I have to believe he’s still alive—he’s not really the type to go out without a fight, and I’m sure there would have been noise.”

Yuuri tensed, then grimaced. “Don’t laugh, but…that’s exactly the kind of ridiculous thing my brain was fixating on when I started to panic. Did you know there’s actually a group of people on the internet who have made up this whole _thing_ about, like, an evil Ikea store, where people wander in by accident and get trapped for _years?”_Yuuri’s hands tightened on his thighs, only just perceptibly, but Victor noticed immediately, attuned to Yuuri’s body language as he was.

“Well, we can’t let that happen,” he said, feeling new determination surge through him. Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and planting his feet, he stood, reaching back for Yuuri’s hand. “Come on. We’re breaking out of here.”

“But you just said that you’re lost, too,” Yuuri protested, grasping Victor’s hand with a surprisingly strong grip and levering himself off the mattress and onto his feet.

“Perhaps,” Victor admitted, “but now there are two of us. Even if we don’t know exactly where we are, sticking together means that we’ll have at least one other person who can say, ‘I know where he is!’ At least, relatively, anyway.” He aimed his brightest smile at Yuuri, hoping he looked more confident than he felt.

Sighing and shaking his head, but with a softer smile of his own, Yuuri adjusted his glasses on his face. “Lead the way, then,” he said.

* * *

“Wait, monsters?” Victor turned to stare wide-eyed at the polo-shirted store employee they’d just passed. His voice rose in alarm, and a family shopping nearby glanced their way curiously.

“I know, right?” Yuuri said, feeling a little comforted by not being alone in his reaction. It was amazing how quickly his mood had turned around. When he’d first gotten a good look at the guy in front of whom he’d made a spectacle of himself, Yuuri had thought he’d never recover; Victor was model-gorgeous, with that platinum hair falling over blue eyes that were no less brilliant for being enormous with worry. 

And of course, then Yuuri had to try to make things even more awkward by mentioning the real possibility that he could have puked all over Victor. 

Amazingly, none of that seemed to put the slightest damper on things, and now, with each moment they spent together, Yuuri found himself growing more fascinated with this perfectly sexy stranger who was somehow also a perfectly lovable dork. “Supposedly, the monsters look pretty much like humans, except that they have blank faces, and at night, they…” Yuuri mimed claws and a grotesque snarl, then clawed at his own chest with a dramatic expression of horrible agony. 

Victor looked appalled. “Why would people make up things like that?” he said indignantly, waving his hands. “Isn’t it bad enough to be packed in here like sardines, made deliberately disoriented so we’ll stick around long enough to spend more, all to wind up with an apartment full of wood piles, hundreds of mysterious bits of hardware, and an Allen wrench? The experience also needs to include the potential of a gruesome death?”

“People like scaring themselves,” Yuuri replied, grinning in amusement at Victor’s outrage. “I mean, why do people make up any horror story? Books, movies, games? Most of the time, actually, I can appreciate a good zombie story. It’s just when it gets a little too realistic, too close to my current reality, and I’m already on the fringes of what I can handle…then it can be the thing that sends me screaming over the edge.”

“Well, I’m not a horror fan, anyway,” Victor sniffed. “There are already enough horrifying things out there in the real world. If I want to be entertained, I’d rather watch something that _doesn’t_ remind me of that fact.” 

“So…comedies?” Yuuri guessed. They were currently making their way through the kitchen showroom, and someone had placed a stuffed rat on a cooktop next to a large pot, posing it holding a wooden spoon twice its height. He grinned and pointed. “Or cartoons? _Ratatouille,_ maybe?”

“I liked _Up._ It had a dog,” Victor said, smiling again. “I do have always have to use that website, ‘Does the Dog Die,’ before I go see any movie, ever since a _former_ friend thought it would be funny to recommend _Hachi_ to me.”

“Holy shit, did you kill them?” Yuuri almost shouted. A nearby woman glared disapprovingly, and he blushed before lowering his voice. “What kind of sadistic—”

Yuuri’s ranting hit an abrupt end as Victor spun and threw his arms around him, pulling him close to his chest. “_Yuu_-ri!” he cried loudly (ignoring the disgruntled woman huffing in exasperation), dragging out the first part of his name as he squeezed the breath from Yuuri’s lungs. “I’m so glad I met you!”

Smothered and flailing between Victor’s pecs, which were apparently every bit as firm has they’d appeared under his fitted sweater, Yuuri was grateful that Victor didn’t seem to need a verbal response. At least the weird screeching noise in his head sounded like a _happy_screech, for the most part.

* * *

Victor was never going to say another bad thing about shopping again. Even Chris was going to get a pass for abandoning him (though he’d reserve the right to turn the tables on him on some future occasion, because that was just fair). 

“Her name is Makkachin,” Victor said cheerfully, switching the assortment of LURVIG dog leashes he’d grabbed from one hand to the other so that he could pull his phone from his pocket. He swiped his thumb over the screen, tapping at it to pull up the most recent photos he’d taken of his poodle. “See? She’s the most perfect dog in the world, isn’t she? And I’m a dog trainer, so I would know.” Yuuri made a gratifyingly appreciative noise, leaning over to get a better look, and Victor’s heart melted. 

“I used to like to take my dog to the beach, too,” Yuuri said, and he sounded a little wistful. “He was actually a poodle, too, except a miniature one. He’d keep trying to run straight into the waves, no matter how many times they knocked him right off his feet. It was one of the few places I couldn’t let him go off-leash—he was just too small, and it was too dangerous.” He swiped to the next picture and suddenly squeaked. 

“I know, that’s such a good photo of her!” Victor agreed. A helpful tourist had taken that picture for Victor, so that he could pose with Makka, holding her under his arm and angling her face toward the lens. Her collar happened to match Victor’s own red and black swim trunks perfectly, an admittedly rather silly conceit that he’d never own up to having intentionally coordinated. Not now, anyway; that sort of confession was definitely third date material, at the earliest.

Could this count as a date? Would Yuuri want it to be? Victor knew what _he_ wanted, of course, but he sternly reminded himself that they weren’t even an hour past Yuuri’s panic attack. Victor needed to stay focused on helping him find his friend, or at least his way out. 

“Y-Yes,” Yuuri was agreeing, and Victor had to think for a moment to remember what question he’d asked. “It’s a very good photo of…of the dog. Your dog. Makkachin.” Yuuri paused, then blinked and shook his head, muttering something under his breath that didn’t sound like English.

“Yuuri, was that Japanese?” When Yuuri looked up at him, smiling softly as his cheeks flushed a little, Victor felt himself falling even farther.

* * *

“That wasn’t a shortcut. Admit it.”

“The sign _said_ shortcut!” Victor was waving his hands helplessly as he turned in circles, mindless of the people around him he only narrowly avoided smacking. 

“Yes, and I suppose it technically was one, except that it was a shortcut back the way we came.” Yuuri flopped backward onto a mattress (MYRBACKA, memory foam, king-sized). He groaned in appreciation, closing his eyes. “Damn,” he said. “Forget Phichit. I live here now. Forward my mail, and tell my advisor I’m finishing up my degree online.”

Victor dropped heavily alongside him, and Yuuri noted with approval that the mattress hardly bounced at all under his own back. “You’d have to deal with the whole ‘no signal’ issue. And even if your professor was fine with seeing random shoppers showing up over your shoulder when you Skyped in, I wonder what the salespeople would say about a young man babbling away into his computer in a dozen different foreign languages every day. I bet they’d think you were a spy or something.” His eyes sparkled with humor as he turned his head sideways on his pillow to face Yuuri.

“Not a dozen,” Yuuri protested, huffing. “Not even half that!”

“Okay, five, Mister Linguistics,” Victor said, rolling his eyes, “but it would still look suspicious. I’m sorry, Yuuri, but they’ll have to lock you up in Ikea jail. Very sturdy European cages. Spy-a-lokken-uppsala, or something like that.”

Yuuri laughed, flopping a hand over his eyes. “Worst Swedish ever, Victor.”

“Well, you would know.” Grinning, Victor bounced up and down a little. “This is a good bed,” he said. “Way better than mine.”

“I know, right? My mattress squeaks to wake the dead every time I move a muscle,” Yuuri sighed.

Victor studied him for a moment, a considering look on his face. “That must be…inconvenient,” he finally said, sounding thoughtful.

“Uh, I guess?” Yuuri said, frowning. “I mean...I would have called it annoying, myself. It’s not like I’m going out of my way to oil the springs or anything, so it’s not really causing any active sort of trouble or extra work for me?” Victor’s expression had shifted; it looked like there was _meaning_ there, and Yuuri wasn’t picking up on whatever the hidden message was supposed to be.

“Well, perhaps not for you, but…your roommate?” Victor replied even more enigmatically, smirking just a bit. “Especially if it was, say, more than just a squeak here and there? On occasions, perhaps, when you use the bed for activities beyond lying still and sleeping, such as—”

“Okay!” Yuuri interrupted, going bright red and rolling off the bed onto his feet. “That’s…that’s not something we’re going to be talking about!” Victor burst into giggles at Yuuri’s reaction, and Yuuri glared at him.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Victor said, trying and failing to control his amusement. “I’m not teasing. Your face, though!” Grinning widely, Victor turned onto his stomach and rested his chin in his hands. He looked thoroughly pleased with himself, and Yuuri felt a sudden urge to replace that satisfied look with something less smug. Glancing to the side, he saw just the thing, so long as he didn’t allow himself a moment to second-guess and talk himself out of the impulse.

“It’s not as though Phichit is around in the evenings to complain,” Yuuri said slowly, rolling off the bed and crossing the aisle toward some dark wood bed frames. A bed tray laden with a casual place setting sat at the foot of a bed, and Yuuri pulled the cloth napkin (GULLMAJ, lace white) from under the plate as he passed. “And if the squeaking gets annoying, it’s pretty simple to just…control the movement that’s causing it?” After trailing a hand along the top of a slatted headboard (TRYSIL, black-brown stain, actually surprisingly sturdy under Yuuri’s grip, which consideration he’d have to revisit much later), Yuuri grabbed the other end of the napkin, snapped it between his hands, and quickly knotted it around a slat. One firm tug, and he turned to level a pointed look at Victor, hoping desperately that he’d managed to look confident and not completely ridiculous.

Victor’s eyes were huge. “Point taken,” he said a beat too late to be convincingly casual. 

\---

There weren’t enough napkins lying around to be of practical use, but once Victor managed to get some blood back into his brain, he’d found inspiration in the moment anyway. “We just have to be careful not to pull too hard,” he said, gently tying together the ends of two more dish towels (TEKLA, white and red). “If we supplement with some of the dog leashes, we can make a long enough rope to at least be able to undo any wrong directions before we get too far.”

“I think that clerk over there is watching us,” Yuuri murmured. Rather than stopping Victor, he shifted sideways to help hide the project from view. Another swell of affection filled Victor’s chest and brought warmth to his cheeks. _My perfect partner in crime._ He grinned wickedly at Yuuri and adored the grin he received in return.

“We’ll put them all back when we’re done,” he said, rationalizing. “And these are floor samples, anyway, not the wrapped packages. Nobody would buy and use the floor samples without washing them, right?”

“I suppose,” Yuuri replied, lifting one end of the rope. “I probably would have felt guiltier an hour ago. You know, that one woman in the kitchen section sent me left the first time I asked her for directions, and when I wound up right back by her ten minutes later, she sent me right? Same question, totally different answers. Didn’t even blink.”

“They won’t break us, Yuuri. I promise you, we’re going to live to shop another day.” Victor smirked as he tied the last knot. “Okay, so the first thing we need to do is make it out of the showroom and to the marketplace. We know _that_ shortcut actually takes us right back to the kids’ beds and dressers,” he said, nodding toward the door leading to one false escape. “So we’ll head away from that, over toward the office furniture.” Victor turned away from the door and took a few steps before realizing he wasn’t being followed. Peering over his shoulder, he saw Yuuri looking just as confused, having headed along a different path entirely. “Um…not this way?”

Yuuri started to shake his head slowly and uncertainly, then sighed and shrugged. “Maybe we should have saved a few of those towels for a tether between us, too.”

_I’d love nothing more,_ Victor only barely managed to bite back before saying it out loud. It really was a growing dilemma: the closer he and Yuuri got to finding their way back to the exit and their friends, the closer they came to the end of their time together. Victor hadn’t yet found the perfect opportunity to suggest an actual date, either. What was he supposed to say? “Yuuri, I hope this isn’t moving TROFAST, but I think we might be SOLLERÖN mates”? There was probably also a pun to be made around the LUSTIGT collection, but Victor was still working that one out.

Instead, he tossed back his hair and threw his most brilliant smile in Yuuri’s direction, feeling gratified at the tiny cheek flush he got in reaction. “We’ll go your way,” he purred as seductively as he knew how. “I’ll follow you anywhere.”

“That’s…” Yuuri bit his lip and glanced away, still blushing. “That’s actually somehow both comforting and sort of foreboding at the same time. But…okay. Just don’t take your eyes off me.” He turned to keep walking, then glanced back at Victor. “That way, if I get swallowed up by an evil shoe rack, you can tell Phichit it’s all his fault.”

It was a joke, of course, but it was also the ideal opportunity for Victor to slip his hand into Yuuri’s protectively. “Never,” he said with a wink.

* * *

It had taken several hours of (admittedly less than dedicated) searching, several failed attempts at using their handmade rope like the string in the labyrinth of myth, a lot of discussion and debate and even a few coin flips, and even more of something Yuuri was becoming harder and harder pressed to deny was genuine flirting, but they finally did it. Ahead of the two of them stretched a sea of shoppers, slumped in exhaustion as they stood in mile-long lines to purchase their flat-packed bookshelves and oversized collapsible lampshades.

“When did it get dark?” Yuuri asked dazedly, peering toward the windows at the front of the store. 

“It is after seven,” Victor said, nudging Yuuri’s shoulder with his own. That was another thing that was making the flirting harder to dismiss; obviously, Victor was a tactile person most of the time, but the last hour had been near nonstop touching of one sort or another. “I don’t know about you, but my feet are screaming at me. I hope Makka doesn’t demand too much walking tonight.”

“Oh, no, Makkachin!” Yuuri gasped. “Has she been alone all this time? Victor—”

“Relax,” Victor chuckled. “The dogsitter has been with her. He might rip me limb from limb when I get home, but there’s no way he would have neglected Makka. He only pretends not to love her. But he has probably eaten the entire contents of my refrigerator. I suppose I’ll have to pick up more food for dinner on the way home.”

Yuuri couldn’t help the twinge of disappointment at the reminder that it was time to part ways. “You could always grab a bag of meatballs,” he said. “They’re just over there in the freezer cases.” The look of nausea that crossed Victor’s face made Yuuri giggle. Then he sighed again, looking back out the windows. “There’s plenty of food at my place, but I don’t know how I’ll get there. What are the odds Phichit and Leo are still here?”

“Probably the same as the odds for whether Christophe found his own way home, as well, but don’t worry,” Victor replied. “I would be happy to take you home. Give you a ride. Er, that is, give you a ride to _your_ home. In my car. Of course.” 

“Wow,” Yuuri said, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from bursting into laughter. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive at all? Maybe we should sit down. If we head back into the store a bit, I think there are some chairs—” His joke was cut off with a squawk as Victor grabbed him around the waist before he could take more than a step.

“Don’t you dare!” Victor gasped. “We barely escaped with our lives! Next time we might not be so lucky.” 

_Lucky,_ Yuuri thought. He would never, ever have predicted that this day would turn out the way it had, but…yes, “lucky” was exactly what he was. And, with Victor’s hands still gripping his hips with no signs of letting go, he felt brave enough to press that luck.

“Maybe,” he said, “if you give me that ride home, we could stop on the way and have din—”

“Yuuri!” The shout came from behind him, bellowed loud enough to be heard over the hum of the crowd. “Over here! Hey, Yuuri!” 

Clenching his teeth around an expletive, Yuuri turned his head and leveled a glare that should have burnt the cheerfully waving Phichit and Leo to a crisp where they stood. Leo, at least, had the grace to look a little sheepish. They were standing just inside the doors, and a manager-type employee seemed to be preventing them from taking one more step.

Victor looked a little disgruntled as well, though it only showed in the way his smile grew a bit tighter as he waved back. “Your friends stayed, after all,” he said lightly.

“Apparently,” Yuuri muttered. Gathering himself once more, he exhaled deeply. _Oh, well._“I suppose we should go over there before they get themselves thrown out.”

As it turned out, that was what had happened in the first place. “I can still edit together what I got, but they made us leave before I could get good rider’s perspective footage of the cart racing,” Phichit lamented, holding his camera out to show the video of his and Leo’s misadventures. “Maybe we can try again sometime. Look, Leo, I told you I beat you that time!”

“Who was filming this?” Victor asked with suspicion. Whoever it was had apparently scaled the racks in the warehouse to get a good overhead angle.

“Some blonde guy,” Leo said. “Chris something?”

“Christophe,” Phichit said, speaking in unison with a groaning Victor. Phichit looked startled, but Victor just waved a hand in resignation, so he shrugged. “We ran into him in the food court, and he seemed friendly. He got kicked out, too, but we traded numbers before he called an Uber. He said he’d seen the friend he rode here with running around the store with some cute Asian...guy...” His brain caught up with the words he was saying, and his sentence trailed off as he stared back and forth between Yuuri and Victor. Delight filled his eyes as a smile spread across his face.

Yuuri was mortified. He had no idea what was going through Victor’s head right now—probably relief that he was escaping this garbage fire before getting too involved. He didn’t want to look over for confirmation, but just as he tried to drop his head forward to study the floor, he was surprised by the weight of Victor’s arm falling solidly across his shoulders.

“Yes, I was,” Victor stated firmly. He sounded almost fierce, and Yuuri lifted his gaze to see him engaged in some sort of silent standoff with Phichit. Leo looked amused. “And we were just making plans for dinner when you found us.”

_We were?_

“Good,” Phichit said. “He deserves it.”

“Yes, I agree,” nodded Victor.

“Phich…”

“Yuuri, I’ll see you in the morning,” Phichit said, placidly grinning.

“It’s just dinner,” Yuuri tried to interject, but Victor was already waving and steering him away toward the parking lot.

“Bye, Yuuri! Make good choices!”

“I hate him so much,” Yuuri groaned, burying his face in Victor’s shoulder as they walked.

“You know,” Victor said, “I don’t think I do.” At Yuuri’s incredulous expression, he shrugged. “I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, after all. Not that I’m calling you a horse! I just mean…”

Well past the limits of his ability to feel anxious or nervous, Yuuri laughed so hard that he almost fell down. 

  


**Author's Note:**

> Later that evening:  
Yuuri: "Hey, Victor?"  
Victor: "Yes, Yuuri?"  
Yuuri: "I'm really glad I got STUK with you."  
Victor: "..."  
Victor: "Marry me."
> 
> \----
> 
> Come find me on [Tumblr](http://carrieosity.tumblr.com).


End file.
